5 Strategies to Keep Your Business Ahead of Fast-Moving
5 Strategies to Keep Your Business Ahead of Fast-Moving. Navigating today’s business world in this age of rapid change is far more complex than managing the crisis of the day.
As a business and entrepreneur adviser, I have no trouble getting owners and managers to agree that change is happening faster and faster in the consumer and technology world, requiring them to keep their businesses more agile just to keep up.
The challenge is that too many are confused about what that means for them, and what it takes to make their business competitively agile.
I just finished a new book, Agility: How to Navigate the Unknown and Seize Opportunity in a World of Disruption, by Leo Tilman and Charles Jacoby, which has helped me net out the key principles for businesses to become more agile.
These authors, and I agree, define agility in business as the ability to detect and assess changes in the competitive world in real time, and then take decisive and effective action. We also agree that agility enables a business to stay healthy and outmaneuver competitors by seizing new opportunities earlier, better defending against threats, and acting as a well-orchestrated and empowered whole on innovative initiatives.
The book brings a wealth of examples to the picture, based on the authors’ strategy consulting with major companies, governments, and the military.
In their experience and mine, the essence of business agility is embodied in the following five principles:
1. Early detection of change and the need for change.
This may seem obvious, but most small-business leaders are so busy with current issues and running the business today that they spend very little time or resources looking for customer culture changes or analyzing new technologies, or political and economic realities, that will impact them.
Crisis-driven agility is not enough today. You need time and resources looking ahead for change. Perhaps failure to look ahead was not the primary reason for the demise of Blockbuster and Kodak, but I see it happening to smaller businesses every day.
